On Thursday I had surgery on my nasal passages and sinuses. My otorhinolaryngologist went in to undeviate my septum, to shrink the nasal lining on either side that when inflamed causes my chronic congestion and to venture into one of my sinuses to remove a polyp and/or other unwelcome growth. It seemed to go well and my recovery is going smoothly. In any case, it is an excuse for a blog post…

This is my brain on x-rays

In preparation for the surgery I had a CT Scan done. Out of the deal I got a CD with some 400 digital images revealing cross sections of the interior of my head. Pretty wild. See more below the fold.

This is a blog called “Humble Piety.” So what does “piety” mean anyway? In sketching out the range of some of the meanings that have attached and can attach to this term, we might gain better understanding of the project here. Following on this historical/etymological/theoretical overture, I will, in subsequent posts, lay out a notion of democratic piety and pursue more concrete investigations into creative expression of piety such as in wedding ceremonies I have recently had the pleasure to witness.

The word piety likely brings to mind religious images: pious acts of devotion to a religious faith. This was certainly in mind when I semi-ironically appropriated the term for a blog which is a project of devotion without necessarily being devoted to a project – at least not a fixed, predetermined project. I sought to devote myself to understanding with greater nuance the challenge of acting on knowledge that is inherently limited and of committing oneself to action without a free-standing criterion to validate one’s ends. Under the watch cry of “epistemic humility,” my hope was and is to articulate values that can serve a better democratic future by leaving behind their theistic analogues. Read the rest of this entry »

So I’m sitting at dinner and my host decides to spark conversation with a blanket denial of global warming. Needless to say, this is not a conversation that I am used to having. Then again, it is not every evening that I am sitting across the table from an extremely wealthy, elderly, intelligent, conservative libertarian bachelor with a flair for provocation and not-entirely-pleasant self-confidence. Maybe he was worked up from our squash games at the Union Club – the second-oldest private club in the United States – where he had to buy me a set of “whites” to wear before I could go on the squash court (my plebeian pink polo was not up to code). This fellow is an interesting character: heir to wealthy Southern Jewish investment bankers whose fortune stretches back to share cropping and Reconstruction, practicing lawyer whose clients have included post-Soviet oligopolies, and confidant of conservative power players and GOP leadership. His worldview rationalizes his social status: he unapologetically parks his beliefs at his own station. Read the rest of this entry »

[ Note from the editor: I am pleased to introduce our first guest blog from long-time friend and collaborator, Graham Sack. The following draws out the lessons of a bygone economic theory for a discipline in crisis. Graham’s history of the “Hotelling line” is an apt and informative follow-up to my recent lengthy post on Paul Krugman and the dangerous but seductive simplicity of reductive economic models. Another example of how insufficiently self-critical knowledge can be led astray. ~ drferris ]

In March 2009, as the markets lay in shambles and prognosticators debated the merits of the recently enacted stimulus bill, there quietly passed the eightieth birthday of the ‘Hotelling line,’ an influential microeconomic model first proposed by Stanford professor Harold Hotelling in his article “Stability in Competition” (PDF). The paper launched two new sub‐disciplines within economics—the study of spatial competition and product differentiation—and is required reading for graduate students and aspiring microeconomists. Along with Edgeworth’s box and Nash’s equilibrium, it is one of the foundational metaphors of the discipline, arresting for its simplicity, clarity, and explanatory power. It is also fundamentally flawed. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Krugman fumed as he read audacious remarks the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs made in testimony before the United State’s Congress:

Dimon had commented that financial crises were just things that happened every few years; Blankfein had compared the crisis to an act of God, like a hurricane. Krugman was curious to know whether these giants of Wall Street understood what they’d done wrong.

But only gradually has Krugman himself come to understand what can go wrong when reductive economic thinking is applied to the real world — and even he has a way to go. An excellent profile by Larissa MacFarquhar in the March 1, 2010, issue of The New Yorker (citations to hardcopy pages follow), traces Krugman’s own consciousness of politically embedded economic knowledge in a way that reveals much about the epistemic stance of the discipline vis-à-vis practical action in the world. Read the rest of this entry »

“I’m not a pundit. I’m just a President…” And indeed Obama was when he met with members of the House of Representatives Republican Caucus on January 29. Obama’s televised Q&A with House GOP (transcript) proved to be a model for professional and productive political discourse with Obama at the top of his game as a knowledgeable, respectful, thoughtful, charismatic leader.

Unlike Locke, Hobbes seeks to embrace religion. But it is a deadly embrace! [*] Locke advocates the separation of church and state that has become engrained in our conception of a secular republic: “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.” [1] However, there is no room for such separation in Hobbesian political theory: “Temporal and spiritual government, are but two words, brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign.” [2] Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Humble Piety,a blog humoring D.r.Ferris as he ponders knowledge and belief in the public sphere. The posts range widely in content. Often approaching feature-length articles, these long-form posts may be unwieldy for the blogosphere but hopefully justify their verbosity. This evolving meditation finds roots in a loving faith in the power of knowledge while exploring the contours of an indispensable democratic principle of "epistemic humility": the virtuous recognition of the limits of our knowledge.

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